On Thursday the Supreme Court rejected the Obama administration’s justification for the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as being covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause, since the law as written would not regulate commerce but compel it.

The court nonetheless upheld the individual mandate, which requires people to buy health insurance from private companies.  The administration had characterized the penalty for not buying insurance as such, yet also asked the court to consider it a tax for the purpose of preventing the plaintiffs from suing, since under the Tax Anti-Injunction Act taxes may be challenged in court only after they have been paid.  Roberts and the majority agreed that the penalty could not be considered a tax for the question of whether the plaintiffs could bring suit now.  Yet in their view, it was perfectly acceptable for the penalty to be considered a tax for the purpose of forcing people to buy health insurance.

Roberts admitted, “Congress’s decision to label this exaction a ‘penalty’ rather than a ‘tax’ is significant because the Affordable Care Act describes many other exactions it creates as ‘taxes.’”

Yet in the majority opinion he wrote, “The Federal Government may enact a tax on an activity that it cannot authorize, forbid, or otherwise control.”

And therein lies the rub: Not purchasing health insurance is not an “activity.”  It is a non-activity.  (The hint is the word “not.”)  read more »

Metaphorically speaking, of course. The real war may come later, or not. Time will tell.

I am frankly astonished that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, bought the bull***t about the ObamaCare individual mandate being a tax, and not a tax, or both being a tax and not being a tax, or some such confusing nonsense. It reminds me of the joke about how many Zen Buddhists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is four: One to change it, one to not change it, one to both change it and not change it, and one to transcend the experience.

That’s sort of funny. But this ruling is no laughing matter, because there is no way to transcend the experience.

In case anyone was wondering, and I am fairly certain you weren’t, I won’t be purchasing “comprehensive” health insurance. I will continue to purchase my “Hail Mary” policy, now called something else to skirt the BarryCare rules. I will continue to pay for my Pap smears and aspirin and occasional stitches out of pocket. And I won’t pay the damned tax penalty for managing my health care in the way I see fit.

Yeah, you heard me, Barry. F*** you and your tax that isn’t a tax but also is a tax. (Explain to me again why the Anti-Injunction Act doesn’t apply if the tax that isn’t a tax is in fact a tax. That seems odd.) You’re as confused about that as you are about your “date rape” mentality that assures you that doing things to people that they do not want done is totally okay.  read more »

By this time, it’s obvious that our glorious leader and fearless visionary is facing a very dicey path on his way to ‘another four years’. The facts are that no one in their right mind wants to see another four years of government sponsored penury… or government tyranny. Barack Hussein Obama committed his latest unconstitutional and illegal act by pronouncing the illegal alien ‘dream act’ through imperial fiat. Nothing, but nothing, this president has done to date is going to have the slap-in-the-face effect that his latest pandering will generate.

While the extra-constitutional behavior of Barack Hussein has the Kool-Aid crowd breathless with adoration, it hasn’t done much for his public relations image with the rest of the country. This is a country of immigrants. The synthesis of many cultures has gone into the formation of this country. The freedoms we enjoy and the opportunities those freedoms represent have been the beacon of promise for millions of legal immigrants… my own ancestors included. They prospered, we prospered, because of what they did, not because of what they had been given. They depended on government for nothing, except to stay out of their way. That’s exactly as the founders envisioned and intended for it to work.  read more »

All Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chávez ever wanted for America was a dictator just like him running the show.  And now we have one.

It isn’t just the Fast & Furious cover-up, although that IS a very big deal.  Invoking executive privilege to keep documents under wraps is a big deal.  What leaves me completely baffled is, if the White House knew nothing about the monkey poop fight at the zoo known as Fast And Furious, then what possible authority allows the assertion of that privilege?  Either Obama and Holder knew that gun dealers in Arizona were told by the BATF to sell guns to straw buyers, or they didn’t.  Either they knew that 1,000 of those guns had gone missing, or they didn’t.

Richard Nixon taught us that the chief executive cannot invoke executive privilege to cover up screwing the pooch.  Or rather, the Supreme Court taught us that, when they slapped Tricky Dick around and made him cough up his tapes.  (Somehow, eavesdropping on your opponent seems quite mild compared to losing track of 1,000 firearms and having a few of them turn up in investigations of murdered law enforcement agents.  Your mileage may vary.)  That this allegedly brilliant Constitutional scholar doesn’t know he can’t use the privilege in that way makes him look like a clown in charge of a very warped circus.  read more »

Everyone milled about anxiously, waiting with bated breath to hear if today would be the day that the Supreme Court handed down their decision on ObamaCare, or perhaps Arizona’s law regarding illegal aliens.  But alas, it was not to be.  With a giant exhale on the order of the massive toilet flush after the last episode of M*A*S*H (yes, that epic flush really did drop a reservoir 27 feet), the disappointed court-watchers went home to wait until Thursday, the next round of breath-bating.

That means they missed something kind of important.  Rather, it is something important if you live in a state that has Indian tribes.

The case is Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians v. Patchak.  One Mr. David Patchak claimed that turning what is known as the Bradley Tract, in Wayland township, Michigan, into an Indian casino would result in economic, environmental, and aesthetic harm.  The tribe’s and the government’s defense was that the provisions of the Indian Relocation Act barred lawsuits intended to prevent putting land in trust and its ultimate development.  The Supreme Court held that the Department of the Interior cannot take land into the reservation system without considering its intended end use, and any objections to that use.  read more »

With Wisconsin recall election exit polling data showing 27% of union members voted for Governor Walker and the last Marquette University poll before the election, indicating the total was closer to 40%, Ed Schultz of MSNBC demanded to know why union members would vote for Scott Walker.

I thought I’d write a response: Ed, as a former member of a public employee union, let me count the reasons:

1. Pro-life issues. 99% of union political contributions go to Democrat Party candidates. Pro-life politicians have become virtually extinct in the Democrat Party. Instead, Democrats at all levels compete with each other to be the candidate who promises the most radical pro-abortion agenda. With this incredible imbalance of contributions, public employee unions have become the major financial source for pro-abortion politicians. Wisconsin Planned Parenthood, of course, endorsed the recall. When I attend pro-life rallies, it is so heartwarming to see people in their green AFSCME t-shirts shouting obscenities at us. The fact is, these days no pro-life candidate of either party, would get a penny in contributions from public employee unions.  read more »

Liberals conspired for two years to plant a web of technologically sophisticated, hard-to-defuse bombs across the country’s urban and suburban centers, explosives that sparked up here and there frightening people and were programmed to detonate four years later.

Conservative SWAT teams screamed and pleaded and begged the public not to let them do it, and tried to stop the impending carnage via arguments, campaigns, and ultimately elections.  Liberals just laughed at the chaos like the Joker.

Twenty-six states sought intervention from the Supreme Court, which may be on the verge of defusing the bombs, and if the Court doesn’t do it the next Republican Congress will.  The right inevitably will spread collateral damage as they storm into downtown areas cordoning off districts, deactivating trigger devices, resetting timers, and safely dismantling and clearing out every last bomb.

Naturally, the media are blaming conservatives for the mess they’re going to make clearing out the explosives liberals planted.

The bombs in question are, of course, the various provisions of Obamacare.  The disorder left by conservatives’ clearing them out constitutes “messy ripple effects” the mainstream media are warning about if conservatives get their way.  read more »

Some of the most enduring images of the great depression of 1929-1939 are those of long lines of obviously beaten-down men in soup lines… hungry women and children with haunted eyes. Shantytowns sprang up all over the country, called Hoovervilles in mocking derision of the disastrous policies that engendered the crash and the even worse schemes which perpetuated the depression until 1939 and the advent of the Second World War.

Twenty five per cent unemployment… some eleven million three hundred thousand people lost their jobs, homes and farms, out of a pre-depression population of 120 million. Contrast that to today, with a population of over 312.8 million with some 27 million American workers no longer on the unemployment rolls. These folks didn’t just fly to never-never land. They are the flotsam and jetsam of Barack Hussein Obama and his DeMarxists’ living fantasies. It’s that pesky hopey changey thing again.

Today, there are forty five million plus families dependent on food stamps in Barack Hussein Obama’s ‘Ameritopia’ (thanks, Mark Levin). There are 15.7 million Americans officially out of work, despite all the DeMarxist spin to the contrary. In Barack Hussein Obama’s America, one million one hundred thousand jobs were lost by women. So much for the Republicans’ and Mitt Romney’s supposed ‘war on women’.  read more »